FBI Sends Ominous Summons to Election Officials for Midterms Prep

The nation’s top spy agency is already prepping for election season.

The FBI called on officials from all 50 states to attend a briefing on midterm election “preparations,” reported Crooked Media’s Matt Berg. The meeting is expected to take place in late February, though exactly what the meeting will be about is still unclear.

Berg obtained an email that was issued to various state officials earlier this week offering specifics. He acquired the note via a public records request.

“Dear Chief Election Officials,” the email begins. “To prepare for the 2026 US midterm elections, your election partners at the FBI, DOJ, DHS, USPIS, and the EAC would like to invite you to a call where we can discuss our preparations for the cycle, as well as updates and resources we can provide to you and your staff.

“The call will be on Wednesday, February 25 (2-3pm EST) and will be for Chief Election Officials,” it continues. “You may designate a proxy to attend in your place if you are not available. On Wednesday, March 4, we will hold a similar call for members of the EAC’s Local Leadership Council.

“We look forward to speaking with you in support of the 2026 midterm elections,” it ends.

The note is signed by Kellie Hardiman, who refers to herself as the “FBI Election Executive.”

A top state election official described the note to Berg as “the strangest thing in the world.”

Another unidentified state official told NBC News that the message was “unusual and unexpected,” especially considering Hardiman was a relative unknown prior to her mass email, as was her position.

“No one has heard of this person—and we’re all wondering what an ‘FBI Election Executive’ is,” said the official, who was granted anonymity by the outlet to speak candidly.

Hardiman titled herself as an intelligence analyst in a 2024 interview with the fashion blog The Style That Binds Us, specifying that she had spent her entire 20-year career at the FBI in that role.

A spokesperson for the FBI was unwilling to explain Hardiman’s letter, telling Berg that the “FBI has no comment.”

The note has only served to ramp up tension over the upcoming midterm elections. Earlier this week, Trump told former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino during an interview that Republicans should “take over and nationalize” elections in several states.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” Trump said. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many—15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

President Donald Trump shared a wildly racist video of former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes during a late-night posting spree on Truth Social.

In yet another erosion of America’s and Trump’s authority on the world stage, the president shared a video on Truth Social late Thursday that ended with a short clip of the Obamas’ laughing heads superimposed on the bodies of apes, while the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays in the background. The video bore a watermark tag of the same account behind the AI-generated video of Trump dropping a massive load of shit on protesters from a fighter jet.

Most of the 62-second video was actually focused on a conspiracy theory that voting machines in certain battleground states had been rigged to favor Joe Biden. It was only the final seconds that contained racist drivel.

The Bulwark’s Tim Miller hit back at speculation that Trump hadn’t meant to share the racist clip. “It was intentional and Trump has been making racist attacks on the Obamas for like 20 years now hope that clears it up for you,” he wrote in a post on X.

Ben Rhodes, a former speechwriter for Obama, wrote on X: “Let it haunt Trump and his racist followers that future Americans will embrace the Obamas as beloved figures while studying him as a stain on our history.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office also slammed the video. “Disgusting behavior by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now,” a post on X read.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed concerns about the video Friday morning. “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” she wrote in an emailed statement to Variety. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

Leavitt also shared the full video, which depicted Hillary Clinton as a boar and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries as a meerkat—but those two were noticeably absent from the clip Trump shared.

Trump normally uses his Truth Social account to post presidential proclamations, appeals to foreign leaders, or screeds against his enemies. But on Thursday, Trump shared a video of a dog being summoned by a can of whipped cream, and another clip of Bruce Lee from Enter the Dragon (1973). He also endorsed “a true friend, fighter, and WINNER,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has become something of a model leader for those on the contemporary right after he systematically weakened his country’s free press, replacing it with a state-controlled propaganda machine.

Elon Musk will have to testify over his role in shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang ruled that “extraordinary circumstances justify” compelling Musk and two former USAID officials, Peter Marocco and Jeremy Lewin, to be deposed in a lawsuit. Former USAID employees and contractors are suing Musk, accusing the former head of the Department of Government Efficiency of illegally dismantling the aid agency.

Chuang noted that the government wasn’t giving the plaintiffs access to documents on key decisions on USAID (and who made them), with previous deposition requests going unanswered. The judge also pointed to Musk’s many posts on X bragging about how DOGE shut down USAID, ruling that Musk and the two officials “likely have personal, first-hand knowledge of the facts relevant and essential to the resolution of this case.”

The Justice Department tried to protect Musk from testifying, arguing that forcing him to do so would “intrude on White House activities and the president’s performance of constitutional duties, which triggers significant separation-of-powers concerns.”

Chuang said in his ruling that Musk wasn’t a Cabinet secretary or agency head, so it wasn’t clear that he had legal protection from testifying. The Trump administration also tried to have the employees’ case dismissed, but Chuang rejected that effort over the summer.

According to a study from The Lancet, USAID had prevented an estimated 91 million deaths in the past 20 years, including those of 30 million children under the age of 5. Now, with the agency in shambles, 14 million more people might die by 2030.

Musk may finally face some accountability for closing the agency, even if depositions are usually kept secret from the public.

“Thousands of federal employees—and millions more around the world—have suffered profoundly as a result of Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s callous dismantling of USAID,” said Tianna Mays, legal director for Democracy Defenders Fund, which is representing the former USAID employees. “We look forward to Mr. Musk being compelled to testify so the American people can finally learn how this administration illegally destroyed a congressionally established agency.”

President Trump is suddenly being nice to the Clintons after they announced their plans to testify in a House investigation into sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein—suggesting that our current president may fear being called to similarly testify once his term ends.

President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were called to testify by House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer.

“I had nothing to do with [Epstein], and they did,” Trump told NBC on Wednesday. “It’s a shame. You have an ex-president, you have the president’s wife and secretary of state. And I said it’s a shame. It is a shame.”

While President Clinton’s ties to Epstein are well documented, this is an aggressive and unusual move to make against a former president. As The New York Times reported, no former president has ever been compelled to testify to Congress under a subpoena.

And Trump certainly noticed the news.

“The Democrats are already saying, ‘If you bring President Bill Clinton, and he has to testify, we’re bringing President Trump,’” NBC’s Tom Llamas asked. “What do you say to that?”

“Well, I think they might say that. But they’ve already brought me.… They had me indicted many, many, times. Many many times.”

“It bothers me that somebody’s going after Bill Clinton,” Trump continued later in the interview. “I liked Bill Clinton. I still like Bill Clinton.… I liked his behavior toward me. I thought he got me, he understood me.” 

On Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked to clarify the president’s glowing comments about his presumed adversary. 

“Yesterday, President Trump in an NBC interview said that ‘it bothers me that somebody is going after Bill Clinton.’ That somebody is the House Oversight Chairman James Comer, a Republican,” a reporter said. “Why is the president bothered that they’re investigating Bill Clinton and his Epstein ties?”

“Look, I think that the president has respect for the former president of the United States, Bill Clinton,” Leavitt said. “He said yesterday himself they’ve shared a good relationship, and that’s what he was reiterating.”

This 180 from Trump will only lead to speculation that he is either afraid that the Clintons have something on him, or that he is afraid Congress will come for him too, once Democrats win back control.  

When private industry refused, Donald Trump tapped his extraordinarily wealthy allies to deport Palestinians back to the West Bank for him.

On January 21, eight Palestinian men were flown from an Arizona airport to Tel Aviv thanks to Florida real estate magnate Gil Dezer, one of Trump’s biggest private donors and a longtime business partner.

Dezer, the son of Israeli American billionaire Michael Dezer, is also an old friend of Donald Trump Jr. and a member of the Miami branch of Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.

The deportees’ trip aboard Dezer’s sleek, 16-seat private jet was a part of a “secretive and politically sensitive US government operation to deport Palestinians arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the Israeli-occupied West Bank,” reported The Guardian.

Dezer’s involvement in ICE’s operations came weeks after Avelo Airlines, the primary commercial air fleet that carried out the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda, canceled its contract with the federal government over mounting public pressure.

And earlier this week, Dezer’s plane was caught shipping more Palestinian deportees. The jet landed at the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, where the deportees were met by a swarm of Israeli security personnel and shepherded by armed guards to a checkpoint near the West Bank village of Ni’lin.

“They dropped us off like animals on the side of the road,” Maher Awad, a 24-year-old who was born in the West Bank but had spent nearly a decade in the U.S., told The Guardian. “We went to a local house, we knocked on the door, we were like: ‘Please help us out.’”

The tail of Dezer’s jet is unmistakable, bearing the logo of Dezer Development, his father’s company. The Dezers and Trump have collaborated for the better part of the last two decades, building several Trump-branded properties in Miami.

The luxury aircraft reportedly made four “removal flights” prior to its trips to Israel, according to data from Human Rights First, an organization that tracks deportation efforts. Those included trips to Kenya, Liberia, Guinea, and Eswatini, all of which have taken place since October.

In an interview with Traded Miami in November, Dezer spoke of his “love” for Trump and said that he’s “very proud of the job he’s doing” in office.

Senator Elissa Slotkin has denied an interview request from the Justice Department regarding its sham investigation into her participation in a video message telling troops they should “refuse illegal orders.”

Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, joined five other military and intelligence veterans in Congress last fall to urge service members to refuse illegal orders.  The video angered President Trump, who accused them of sedition and suggested they be executed.

The Justice Department announced an individual probe into Slotkin’s role in January, and her recent refusal to cooperate is a confrontational move that will force the administration to show how serious it really is about this sedition thing. 

“I did this to go on offense,” Slotkin said on Wednesday. “And to put them in a position where they’re tap dancing. To put them in a position where they have to own their choices of using a U.S. attorney’s office to come after a senator.”

Slotkin’s lawyer, Preet Bharara, requested that U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro “immediately terminate any open investigation and cease any further inquiry concerning the video.”

Senator Mark Kelly has also struck back, suing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for retaliating against him and violating his rights to free speech and due process.

The White House is letting Attorney General Pam Bondi take the heat for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s presence at the Fulton County, Georgia, election office during an FBI raid.

Last week, Gabbard was photographed overseeing FBI agents as they packed up and walked out with ballots from the 2020 presidential election, despite the fact that she is prohibited from taking part in domestic law enforcement operations. As public scrutiny boiled over, Gabbard told Democratic lawmakers that Donald Trump himself had asked her to be there—but he is apparently not sticking by her side.

Instead, Trump blamed Gabbard’s attendance on Bondi Thursday, telling attendees at the National Prayer Breakfast that Gabbard “took a lot of heat ... because she went in at Pam’s insistence ... and she looked at votes.

“They say, ‘Why is she doing it?’” Trump said. “Because Pam wanted her to do it.”

But the president’s explanations have been far from consistent. During a sit-down interview with NBC News Wednesday, Trump tried to explain away Gabbard’s latest controversy by blaming the whole fiasco on China’s alleged attempts to infiltrate U.S. elections.

“Why is Tulsi Gabbard there?” asked NBC’s Tom Llamas, point-blank.

“I don’t know, but you know, uh, a lot of the cheating comes from, it’s international cheating,” Trump told the network. “You have people—they say—from China trying to, let me ask you, do you think China tries to influence our election?”

“We know that foreign governments try to influence a lot of things in this country,” Llamas replied.

“Well, therefore, she’s foreign governments,” Trump said.

Since Trump first planted the seeds of doubt about the results of the 2020 election, a litany of his allies have continued to tend and water the theory—so much so that within a handful of years, refusing to admit that Trump ever lost to Joe Biden has become a fealty test for MAGA membership.

But there is no doubt: Trump lost that election by a landslide, coming up short by 38 electoral votes. More evidence that Trump did not win is the fact that he was not inaugurated in 2021, and did not serve a day as president until he succeeded in 2024.

But for anyone still in doubt, know that the theory has been thoroughly debunked by the president’s own appointees. Trump’s previous attorney general, Bill Barr, announced in 2022 that despite an intensive, multi-agency investigation, no evidence of widespread fraud had been discovered that supported the president’s wild claims.

Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts announced a lawsuit Wednesday aimed at challenging the FBI’s sudden seizure of the county’s electoral ballots.

Donald Trump’s frivolous $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over his leaked tax returns, if he were to win or get a settlement, would be paid entirely by U.S. taxpayers.

That’s what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said during a Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs hearing Thursday. Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego asked Bessent, who is also acting director of the IRS: “Where would that be cut from? Let’s say, for some reason, he actually wins that lawsuit. Where would that $10 billion come from?”

Bessent had trouble getting the words out.

“Um, it would come from—” Bessent began.

“Process-wise; I’m not asking your opinion whether it’s right or wrong,” Gallego interjected.

“It would come from Treasury,” Bessent said. Gallego pressed him on if those funds would come from the U.S. Treasury’s general fund, to which Bessent said yes, “the Treasury’s general account.”

“So, taxpayers?” Gallego asked. Bessent said yes, adding, “part of the 44,000 taxpayers whose returns were leaked,” referring to how the same person who leaked Trump’s returns also leaked those of thousands of other wealthy people.

“They’re not suing,” Gallego replied.

The whole conversation shows the absurdity of Trump becoming the first sitting president to sue the executive branch and demand that American taxpayers pay him for his taxes being leaked. The leak came from one IRS employee and wasn’t directed by the agency, and that employee was convicted and sent to federal prison.

Even then, the leak took place during Trump’s first term under a director he appointed, and he’d have a hard time proving damages in court. Trump’s net worth has nearly tripled to $6.4 billion since his taxes were disclosed in September 2020.

It looks a lot like a corrupt president is trying to pay himself billions of dollars—two-thirds of the IRS’s proposed budget—to soothe his ego.

In 1963, NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was gunned down outside of his own Mississippi home by Byron De La Beckwith, a Ku Klux Klan member. Now the Trump administration wants the National Park Service to stop calling Beckwith a racist.

Anonymous Park Service officials told Mississippi Today that they were being ordered to make ahistorical and incredibly political omissions to the brochure that accompanies the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument.

The original brochure stated that Beckwith was part of “the racist and segregationist White Citizens’ Council,” but it has now been removed from the monument.

If shooting Evers wasn’t evidence enough for Beckwith’s deep racism, his past interviews certainly are. An interview he did in 1990—four years before he was actually convicted for his 1963 murder—sees him calling the racist White Citizens’ Council “the first ray of light Dixie had seen since we fought through Reconstruction and captured the right to vote, the right of white people to run the South.”

“N—s are beasts. It says so here in the book of Adam,” he said in the same interview. Beckwith, who also belonged to the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, still called Evers a “mongrel” over 30 years after killing him, adding that “God hates mongrels.”

This is the legacy that President Trump is choosing to obscure as part of his “Restoring Truth and Sanity in America” executive order, an all-out disinformation campaign against any history that is honest about the oppressive actions of white Americans. Under the same act, the Trump administration removed a picture of Harriet Tubman from the National Park Service page on the Underground Railroad and changed the words “enslaved African Americans” to “enslaved workers.” It also removed a section that discussed Benjamin Franklin being a slave owner.

“You can talk about Martin Luther King Jr. overcoming.… You just can’t talk about what he overcame,” said Alan Spears, senior director for cultural resources at the National Parks Conservation Association. “It’s turning the assassination of Medgar Evers into something that is bloodless and had no impact. We can talk about him being a wonderful veteran, but not about what it cost him. He gave the last full measure of devotion, and now we want to ignore that.”

The Trump administration wants you to forget that Evers was murdered for his activism by a man who did not think Black people were dignified human beings. Don’t let them.

Donald Trump’s economy has led to the worst January in job cuts since the Great Recession in 2009.

U.S.-based employers laid off 108,435 employees last month, three times as many as in December and twice as many as January 2025, according to a monthly report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a firm that helps executives transition to new jobs. The country hasn’t had a January this bad in seven years, the report said.

Two companies are responsible for 40 percent of these job losses: Amazon, which cut 16,000 jobs, and UPS, which cut 30,000 jobs. The cuts are even related: UPS’s cuts are connected to how it is winding down a delivery agreement with Amazon.

The most layoffs were seen in five industries: transportation, technology, health care, chemical manufacturing, and financial.

“Generally, we see a high number of job cuts in the first quarter, but this is a high total for January,” said Andy Challenger, the firm’s chief revenue officer, in a statement. “It means most of these plans were set at the end of 2025, signaling employers are less than optimistic about the outlook for 2026.”

The report attributes 30,784 of the job losses to ending contracts, such as that of UPS. Market and economic conditions led to 28,392 layoffs, 20,044 were caused by restructuring, and 12,738 were due to closures. AI was responsible for 7,624 job cuts, and tariffs were only attributable to 294 last month.

Meanwhile, job creation did not come close to mitigating these layoffs. The payroll processing firm ADP announced only 22,000 jobs were created last month, the weakest numbers in three months and the worst January since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021. Most of those job gains came from hiring in the health care industry, and came after 2025 had the weakest annual job growth in 22 years. Unemployment is also up, with 231,000 claims filed in the last week of January, an eight-week high, according to the Department of Labor.

All of this belies Trump’s claims that everything is going well and that his policies are good for American businesses and workers. His administration has resorted to pushing fake statistics to prop up its claims, but Trump can’t cover up the fact that more and more Americans are struggling to afford basic needs. All of this bad news is self-inflicted, as Trump has sabotaged an economy that was actually much better under Biden.